


The Dark Line

by brasspetal



Series: The Nameless Quiet [1]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Developing Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-01
Updated: 2017-06-01
Packaged: 2018-11-07 13:45:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11060241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brasspetal/pseuds/brasspetal
Summary: Somewhere in the in between, there’s a gap in the horizon where the sky meets the Earth.





	The Dark Line

Somewhere in the in between, there’s a gap in the horizon where the sky meets the Earth.

Rick stands with it in his periphery, as all things but he knows it’s there. That dark line.

Light still clawed its way along the hillside.  Old tombstones and hallowed out trees greeted with silence. His tattered clothing and unkempt hair billowed in the wind as he shambled along the road.

There was something vicious in the woods, killing people in the next town over but Rick didn’t pay it much mind. He wasn’t looking for a reason to die, _not yet_. He _was_ looking for Daryl. Daryl, who was very much like the woods themselves. He held vines in his heart; wrapped up and overgrown.

The sun beat against his back, burning against his skull. The ends of his hair are wet with sweat.  It was his natural state to cook from the inside out. One of these days, he’s going to fall to the pavement and become ash.

The air smelled like something was burning, a forest fire maybe. It would grow wild and eat away the trees until a rainstorm smothered it. There was an old comfort in that.

Rick still had that old world hope that kept him from becoming a corpse and he thinks it has to do with the company one keeps. The longer you spend time with someone the more you mold together. It’s the way of the things. The woods lived in Rick too as they did Daryl. Rick gave him a bit of that hope too.

They didn’t speak much when they’d sit together but they didn’t need to. There was a companionable silence that was more a comfort than most things were.  Rick had never fit together like that with someone.   He thinks of Shane and the person he was, left behind in the dirt. His thoughts like to remind him often of the people he’s failed. He’s gotten used to seeing faces in the dark of long dead ghosts. They don’t frighten him, not anymore. All those people that live in his skull, as if it were a tomb, resting inside his head.

Rick knows Daryl sees Beth sometimes too. He’s watched the darkened woods a little too long with an archaic kind of grief. He recognized it immediately, like looking in the mirror.

How many more years did they have of sitting at the side of the road with everything to say and no need to say it? How many more dead would voice their anguish at them before they too began to sing the same song?

It didn’t matter. What mattered was the shoulder that brushed his and the belief that there was no use in dying, _not yet._

He didn’t know how long his feet had carried him but the world was becoming blurry. There was a camouflage over the landscape and he tries to blink it away. He spotted Daryl in the trees and even though his back was turned, Daryl knew he was there. He would always find him, through the mud and misery.

In the deep creeping silence, Rick approaches Daryl, sweaty and exhausted. Daryl held up a rock, squinting with one eye towards the sun. It wasn’t much of anything but he gave it to Rick like it was something worth holding onto.

It felt smooth, polished and Rick wondered how long Daryl had held onto it but he didn’t ask. He never did, it was the way of things.

When they enter the thick brush instead of heading back, Rick thinks this is something to hold onto too. Time may not have treated them well but here they were, shoulder brushing shoulder.

It was the rule of inevitability and that comfortable awareness. Daryl nods at him once and the forest opens up for them, ready to swallow them whole. _This_ , this was their repose.


End file.
